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The Ohio Campaign

“Oh come on, Josh,” Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, said on Thursday night in his last debate against Josh Mandel, the state treasurer. Mandel had just accused him of abetting the theft of $716 billion dollars—“Where did that money go for Social Security? What did you do with it?”—by which he seemed to mean the $716 billion projected in future savings to Medicare, which will be used to shore up health care for seniors in other ways, but it’s hard to say, since his tone suggested that the money had been stashed in, say, a couple of dozen houses or wristwatches. This debate, like the others between the two—as well as their entire race—was shaky on the details, steady on the hostility (Brown: “I know this sounds like Washington-speak to Josh, but you have to vote yes or no on issues,” this after Mandel had refused to say how he felt about the Ryan budget on the grounds that he’d have his own, unexplained plan), and laced with weirdness. At one point, during a commercial break, Mandel jumped behind the curtains, which was against the rules; he said that it was to have his makeup touched up. Some commentators were glad that neither yelled about the other being a liar, as they did in the last debate, which opened with the moderator announcing, gamely, “This has been the most expensive U.S. Senate race in the country this year!”

Maybe it has, with Mandel and various groups putting up close to twenty million dollars against Brown—a lot of that has been sent over by Karl Rove—and about half that amount on the Brown side (though a final verdict will have to wait an accounting of the Warren-Brown Massachusetts race, where the debates have been even more lurid). The Washington Post raised the question of why the Republicans were bothering, since if they wanted to get the Senate back there were easier targets. And why should the rest of us be watching this race, other than out of a desire to beat ourselves up about the state of our country’s political discourse? There is a simple, three-word answer: Ohio, Ohio, Ohio.

The money and the noise in the Presidential and Senate races amplify each other. As the First Read blog that Chuck Todd, of NBC, who moderated the final debate, co-writes, put it, “If we learned anything from last night’s Sherrod Brown-vs.-Josh Mandel debate here in Cincinnati….it’s that the race is essentially a proxy for the presidential contest on Ohio.”

There are ideological and political issues, like the bailout (Mandel: “I’m not a bailout Senator!”; Brown: “to be against the auto rescue just boggles my mind.”) and abortion (Mandel supports a ban with an exception only for the life of the mother, and maybe not even for that, and called Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock a class act; Brown has a strong pro-choice record). There is also the matter of the Republican Party’s apparent high hopes for Josh Mandel, which seem a little misplaced. He is a thirty-five-year-old Iraq War veteran. But there is something brittle and crinkly about him, like a toy still wrapped in plastic. (To get a sense of his affect, watch Jon Stewart’s segment on Twinns, dolls made to look like the children who own them and produced by a firm in which Bain Capital, and Mitt Romney personally, inexplicably invested.) As the Times noted, the G.O.P. will have a harder time winning back the Senate than it might have because many of its candidates exhibit extremes of politics or personality. Sometimes, as in Missouri, Republicans can blame the Tea Party. In Ohio, it’s just who they are.

But the real point is the electoral college. As Nate Silver keeps saying—and one can place the qualifications my colleague John Cassidy laid out on that phrase—Ohio has a fifty-per cent chance of being the deciding state this election, meaning that its electoral votes will be the most closely won and provide the margin of victory. (He also says that, as of Thursday, Obama has a seventy-five per cent chance of winning Ohio.) And so the Ohioan campaigns and the Ohioan Campaign are beginning to blur. The telescope that made New Hampshire and Iowa so big at the beginning of the election has swerved around, and now is on Ohio, except that the balance of the Senate may be at stake, too. (Not to forget New Hampshire and Iowa entirely, though: they are still swinging.)

Ohio, meanwhile, is one of a number of swing states now possibly in the path of Hurricane Sandy. So is Florida; is there enough airtime in either state to contain both the storm updates and the political ads? Sandy could come to North Carolina, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, plus other states whose electoral votes no one seems to be fighting for. (New York, otherwise unsuited for marginality, is one of them.) Politico asked whether Sandy “could be our October surprise”—suggesting that we have every right to expect a surprise of some sort or another, and maybe we do.